Every Scar a Story
by lastingopposite
Summary: Even a superhero with enhanced healing has a few scars. Oneshot, Peter/Gwen.


**Note: **Written to fill the "scars/scarification" square for kink_bingo. Not a sequel to "Sticky Situation," but assumes Peter and Gwen are now intimate. Thank you to LadySilver for the beta.

* * *

Gwen carefully touches a fresh wound on his cheek, her forehead creasing with worry. "Ouch, that's a new one," she says. Peter can tell she's trying to keep her voice light, but her face betrays her thoughts.

"It'll be gone by tomorrow," he tells her. Minor cuts and bruises are usually unnoticeable after a night's rest. A product of his genetically enhanced healing.

She knows this, he's come to her window a hundred times with similar marks in a thousand different places. Sometimes, if the rest of the night is quiet, and he's lucky enough to wake beside her, she touches the unblemished spots as if she needs to test what her eyes perceive is really scientifically sound.

She nods anyway, lowering her eyes to a scar across his bare shoulder. She runs her fingers across it idly. What she doesn't need to say is, how much worse was this one, if I can still see it?

Instead, she kisses it with soft lips, her eyes open. His eyes close. Everything is heightened with her, every touch more electrified that whatever it is that makes him stick to walls. Her tongue darts out and traces the scar from top to bottom, and then she suckles the edge. He lets out a groan of pleasure.

She stops. He's expecting her to kiss him, but when nothing happens for several long moments, he opens his eyes again.

She still has her attention on the scar, her index finger hovering over it. "Tell me about it, Peter. How did you get this one?"

"How?" his eyes drift toward the ceiling, remembering. "Hmm... I think... I think it was one of the first. Something stupid. Like I let a guy's blade get too close. Before I-"

He cuts off, her lips back to working the scar. When she notices he's stopped talking, she lifts her head. "Keep going."

"Okay..." He remembers the way it felt when the blade sliced into his flesh, deep and agonizing, how he somehow knew it was coming, but didn't trust his instincts to move out of reach in time. "Anyway, it was before I realized just exactly what my 'spider-sense' was. Before the spandex. I was still acting like Peter Parker in a ski-mask, not Spider-Man."

She continues to kiss and lick it, and he forces himself to keep talking.

"I mean, I got him in the end, but there was so much blood. I was really glad I was wearing a red hoodie, and I was terrified that Aunt May was going to notice that the first aid kit was missing all the cotton gau-"

The feeling of the tip of Gwen's nose sliding across the scar halts him again. "Peter," she chides.

"That's _really_distracting, you know." Her lips twist in an almost infinitesimal smirk, and she holds that expression until he sighs. "Yes, ma'am, keep going." He takes a deep breath. "Anyway, after all that worry, when I checked the wound the next morning, it looked more like a cat scratch than a stabbing. I was almost late for school researching the healing properties of spiders online."

What she's doing feels so amazing - as if the sensation of her touch is replacing the memory of pain he has when he catches sight of his scars in the mirror.

When he's done talking about the incident, she gives the scar a final peck and then turns her attention to another spot, just below his ribs. "What about this one?" Her fingers caress it in a circular motion. "Gunshot wound?"

"Yes." That one is a lot more recent. He isn't sure if he is imagining it, but instead of the lone robber here and there, he's running across more and more organized crews. "It went straight through; can you feel it on the other side?"

She finds the exit scar by feel and nods, her lips closing around the entry scar. Her tongue explores the circular ridges.

Most of the time, his spider-sense warns him in time, no matter how many he's up against (and sometimes he just leaves things to the police when he knows he's outmanned), but this crew had multiple weapons, and even a couple of snipers. He could give Gabby Douglas a run for her money in the gymnastics department (is she looking for work, by the way?), but it's still hard to dodge twenty speeding bullets.

"There was a crew knocking over a bank. I managed to capture and disarm most of them, but one of the them made it to the getaway van. As I was chasing him down, I-I-" He stutters to a stop as she grazes her teeth across the scar. But he keeps going, he does not want that feeling to stop. "...I felt a prickle of danger from over my shoulder and barely avoided a sniper bullet from one direction, only to get hit by another from a different direction."

"What did you do?" she murmurs against his skin, the vibrations of her voice heightening the sensation.

He remembers being so full of adrenaline that even the tearing pain of the bullet burrowing through him and out again didn't completely register. "I stopped the van with a high tensile-strength web on the street, and doubled back after the shooters." He taps his temple. "I was still feeling enough danger from them to narrow the locations down."

In the end, the police had gotten wind of the heist and he could focus his attention on catching the snipers. He left them webbed several feet off the ground and barely made it home before collapsing into bed. "You remember the day a couple of months ago that I didn't come in until after lunch?"

She nods without removing her mouth, humming a yes. He remembers several frantic texts and phone calls that he'd only seen after Aunt May had plied him with chicken soup and pronounced him fit to leave his bed. Luckily he and Gwen had learned to communicate in code long ago.

She raises up onto her elbows and turns her eyes onto the long claw marks that can still be seen faintly across his abdomen. She doesn't need the story about those, but she kisses her way across them anyway.

"I'm not sure what you want me to tell you about those that you don't already know..."

"You don't need to tell me anything." He feels her lips curl up in a smile, and then her hands begin working at the clasp of his jeans. "Let's see what other scars are under here..." He stops speaking - well, anything coherent, anyway - for quite a long time.


End file.
